title: A new self-report scale for assessment of adolescent psychopathology: factor structure, reliability, validity, and diagnostic sensitivity.
abstract: This paper describes four studies on self-reported problems in 2,243 adolescent males and females, 12 to 17 years of age. In Study 1, principal-axis factoring of 102 items covering 11 problem domains revealed six factors comprising 49.5% of the variance. Study 2 used confirmatory factor analysis of a 64-item reduced set on a new sample of 408 adolescents. Goodness-of-fit indicators suggested that the six-factor model had excellent fit to the data. Study 3 used data from the 2,157 adolescents used in the first two studies. Coefficient alphas ranged from .83 to .92. Median test-retest reliability for the six factors was .86. There was a consistent structure of the correlation matrix across age and gender. Study 4 was a study of criterion validity, using an additional sample of 86 children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sensitivity and specificity were high, with an overall diagnostic efficiency of 83%. This new self-report scale, the Conners/Wells Adolescent Self-Report of Symptoms (CASS), may provide a useful component of a multimodal assessment of adolescent psychopathology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA.
authors.forename: C K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Conners
authors.forename: K C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Parker
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sitarenios
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Diamond
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Powell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D002170:Canada; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014481:United States